"

"I was wolfish for a moment, I suppose. Things had gone wrong
generally. But if you are going to scold me, Margaret, I would rather
have some more--arnica."

"I am not going to scold; but while you stood there, so white and
terrible,--so unlike yourself,--I felt that I did not know you,
Richard. Of course you had to defend yourself when the man attacked
you, but I thought for an instant you would kill him."

"Not I," said Richard uneasily, dreading anything like a rebuke
from Margaret. "I am mortified that I gave up to my anger. There was
no occasion."

"If an intoxicated person were to wander into the yard, papa would
send for a constable, and have the person removed."

"Your father is an elderly man," returned Richard, not relishing
this oblique criticism of his own simpler method. "What would be
proper in his case would be considered cowardly in mine. It was my
duty to discharge the fellow, and not let him dispute my authority. I
ought to have been cooler, of course. But I should have lost caste
and influence with the men if I had shown the least personal fear of
Torrini,--if, for example, I had summoned somebody else to do what I
didn't dare do myself. I was brought up in the yard, remember, and to
a certain extent I have to submit to being weighed in the yard's own
scales."

"But a thing cannot be weighed in a scale incapable of containing
it," answered Margaret. "The judgment of these rough, uninstructed
men is too narrow for such as you. They quarrel and fight among
themselves, and have their ideas of daring; but there is a higher
sort of bravery, the bravery of self-control, which I fancy they do
not understand very well; so their opinion of it is not worth
considering. However, you know better than I."

"No, I do not," said Richard. "Your instinct is finer than my
reason. But you _are_ scolding me, Margaret."

"No, I am loving you," she said softly. "How can I do that more
faithfully than by being dissatisfied with anything but the best in
you?"

"I wasn't at my best a while ago?"

"No, Richard."

"I can never hope to be worthy of you."

But Margaret protested against that. Having forced him to look at
his action through her eyes, she outdid him in humility, and then the
conversation drifted off into half-breathed nothings, which, though
they were satisfactory enough for these two, would have made a third
person yawn.

The occurrence at Slocum's Yard was hotly discussed that night at
the